LAURA COX HAS performed for more than 100 million people on her YouTube channel — not including the rapt audiences she’s won over on both sides of the Atlantic — but until recently, she had never been the sole guitarist onstage.
“I’m the only guitar player right now, and I’m touring with a keyboard player because I wanted to try some new directions,” she explains via Zoom, ahead of releasing her third album, Head Above Water (earMUSIC). “I wasn’t sure I could make it, but I surprised myself, in a good way.”
Now her live audiences are learning what half a million subscribers already knew — when Cox picks up a guitar, it’s going topath to primal blues-rock glory. While her 2017 debut, , and the 2019 follow-up, , were primarily hard-rocking affairs, dials back the fury in favor of more fleshed-out arrangements and a wider array of instrumentation. Instead of working out the songs with the band in her native France, Cox holed up in Portugal by herself to write and demo the album’s 11 tracks.
